I have been working quite a bit in South-West England and have stayed recently in Exeter, the capital of Devon, though the local authority for the city is breaking away from the rest of the county. It is a pleasant enough city with nice pedestrian areas and gardens, a pleasant cathedral and some decent pubs. It also has a university, not an ancient one, being set up in 1955 so a decade ahead of the 'plate glass' universities of the mid-late 1960s expansion. It achieved some reputation in the 1980s, simply because of its advertising campaign which used the typography of the Carlsberg beer company and even lifted their slogan (I imagine with permission) as 'Probably the best university in the world' in the place of 'best beer'. Aside from that it seems to have trundled along not attracting much attention, though I have been told that its teacher-training branch is rated third after Oxford and Cambridge, that sort of fact does not penetrate the newspapers, I guess unless you read specific sections. Its Chancellor is Floella Benjamin, born in Trinidad, known to millions as a television presenter on children's programmes, and notable in that fact because she was a black presenter in the 1970s. Recently she was made a baroness and now sits in the House of Lords for the Liberal Democrats.
It seems ironic that Floella is Chancellor of a university of a city which seems to have one of the least ethnically diverse populations in the UK. I have not been to Plymouth yet, it is farther South-West of Exeter and has a post-1992 university. In the city you do see some West Asian and East Asian students, but very few people from other ethnic groups and certainly very few outside the student population. I imagine that in part this was one reason why the actress Emma Thompson's adopted son, Tindyebwa Agaba, originally from Rwanda where his entire biological family was killed in the genocide, found studying at the university so hard. When he graduated in 2009, Thompson spoke about the racism he had faced and assisted with a cultural awareness event at the university.
It does not seem that racism is the only problem that Exeter has faced. Having stayed in hotels in Exeter on and off over the past year, I have encountered a few new staff and even some mature students, usually there for doctoral course meetings who have pointed out the real class consciousness of the university. One man working as a manager there explained how he was suffering because he was felt to 'not be appropriate' for a managerial role because his family was skilled working class and on repeated occasions he had been told to apply for lower grade jobs. Having faced similar challenges in the past year, I lent a sympathetic ear. He said that it was incredibly frustrating that the concern seemed to be more with his background and there was disregard for his skills and experience. One woman of the same grade who droned on about her aga cooker (the cheapest costs £6000) and got upset because he would not sit there and let her lecture him on the 'best way' to do everything. When he tried to have a dialogue and share ideas she ended the meeting. Naturally you meet arrogant, self-obsessed people in all jobs but you would expect slightly more open-minded attitudes in a university.
I subsequently met a parent, from Bournemouth, whose son had applied to the university and she said she was glad he had not got in, because she felt everyone 'looked down their noses' at you if you were not of a particular social status and did not have the trappings like a large 4x4 vehicle. Obviously the location of the university in pretty rural part of the UK and in the southern part which is the most expensive (though it is cheaper in Devon than, say in Hampshire or Berkshire, farther East), you might expect it to attract people from a certain social class and certainly the students I encountered, even one working in a pub, are very much upper middle class or even upper class. The University of Exeter is in step with the national trend in having a sizeable majority of female students, so the place (I wandered around the campus one day out of interest, it lies close to a pub I like) is full of flicky haired women with tops from the lacrosse club or sailing club or riding club; no-one seemed to be in the usual sort of societies you expect at a university. The student union shop stocks 'The Lady' and 'Horse and Hounds', not the usual magazines students at university read.
Given the demands that I have noted before from journalists, parents and others that in this age of over 40% of 18-year olds going to university, there is a greater distinction made between different 'qualities' of university, favouring something even more divisive than the old polytechnic/university divide scrapped in 1992, I am surprised that Exeter University has not made more of its elitist approach. It is never going to have the old buildings of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, etc., but it clearly has the same kind of mindset of these places (I lived in Oxford for two years and gatecrashed the odd University lecture and debate and blagged my way into a number of bars at different colleges, just for the hell of it).
Maybe there is some website or Facebook connection which advises families of the elites that if their child has not got into Oxford of Cambridge, Exeter is the best place to send them to mix with the 'right' kind of people whether students or staff. I imagine given the hard economic times, though Exeter University seemed to do well out of the last funding round, the university cannot be seen to be too off-putting to potential students from all kinds of backgrounds, they are simply too valuable in terms of fees. However, as that Bournemouth mother found out, I would warn any parent who is not upper middle class or higher, to avoid the University of Exeter like the plague. There may be advantages in your child hob-nobbing with the elites, but from the people I have heard from, they may be compelled to do a lot of 'forelock tugging' and be deferential to staff and other students unless they want to be ostracised. If you are upper middle class or above, and your beloved has not manage to make Oxbridge, then I can assure you that they will find much the same culture, albeit in more modern buildings (and the university is currently the biggest building site in the South-West region so must be doing well financially) that they would find in Oxford or Cambridge, mixing with the 'right' kind of people and taught and administered by staff who are drawn from the 'appropriate' social class.
I know we now have a government which favours the privileged, but I am surprised that given their desire for greater social mobility, and even Lord Mandelson emphasised this back in 2008 when reviewing the future of universities, the government did not bring the University of Exeter more to book. It seems to be one institution that has benefited financially but has a culture which is opposed to social mobility and instead fosters social division and providing benefits to the already privileged. Clearly the journalists whining for more distinction between universities are not looking hard enough. Perhaps they know about Exeter but only let their friends into its approach rather than write about it openly. Now I am no longer working in the South-West I wonder if I will come across other universities, which quietly are drawing sharp dividing lines in terms of who they admit and who they employ. I do feel we have a duty to 'name and shame'. Universities in my day were about opportunities for those who could take them on their ability not simply who their parents were and I fear we are running rapidly away from those days to them simply helping privileged children to be more privileged still.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Saturday, 3 July 2010
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Feel No Shame - Call Bigots What They Are: Bigoted
This election campaign seems to be moving into the realms of the surreal. Some mornings I wake up and think I am in 1906 or at least 1922 with the election seeming to be about the Liberals versus the Conservatives with this marginal party, Labour, attracting minimal interest. It is a fantasy, of course. I agree the Liberal Democrats represent a progressive voice and I support a number of their policies, but, as I have noted before, even with a 6% swing to them against both Labour and the Conservatives they will at most receive ten or twenty new seats. Yes, they may hold a balance in a hung parliament, but Nick Clegg as prime minister is only going to happen in some alternate reality, not this one. Much of the media, want us to think something very different. Even 'The Guardian' has defected from supporting Labour to backing the Liberal Democrats and in sharp contrast to 1997 no newspaper now supports Labour. Of course, this is not surprising. Newspapers have not, in reality, supported the Labour Party since the 1970s. What they backed in 1997 was the Christian Democrat Blair Party. Brown's problem is actually to bring the Labour Party back to being the Labour Party and there is no support among the elites for that and there has not been since the era of the Thatcherite/Washington consensus came into British politics from 1974/9 onwards.
More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties. For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign. However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him. Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter. She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK. This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work. Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'. In this he has suffered many politicians. US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984: 'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' President George Bush made many such gaffes. Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.
Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted. I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation. Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather. This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies. Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements. When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing. The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities. The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British. Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded. Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed. I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status. We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates. I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk. There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.
Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state. This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits. It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs. What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us. In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.
If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it. Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them. Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen. The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society. As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.
I was proud of Gordon Brown this week. When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.
More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties. For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign. However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him. Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter. She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK. This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work. Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'. In this he has suffered many politicians. US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984: 'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' President George Bush made many such gaffes. Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.
Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted. I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation. Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather. This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies. Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements. When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing. The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities. The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British. Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded. Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed. I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status. We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates. I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk. There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.
Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state. This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits. It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs. What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us. In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.
If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it. Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them. Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen. The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society. As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.
I was proud of Gordon Brown this week. When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.
Friday, 12 March 2010
The 'They're So Privileged' Brand of Racism
People often say that the British, in contrast to our European neighbours, are reluctant to talk about politics. However, in my experience there is one type of politics they seem to have no embarrassment in sounding off about and that is racist politics. Anyone who travels in a taxi knows that within a matter of moments of the car starting you will be subjected to a string of racist comments that sound they come straight from the BNP manifesto. Ninety percent of taxi drivers, men and women, seem compelled to outline their racist views. Even the black comedian Lenny Henry has commented on this, noting the exception that they make for him 'well, of course, Lenny, I'm not talking about people like you' as if that permits them to continue with their diatribe.
I encountered this phenomenon last night not in a taxi but when I was waiting to pay for a meal. The man, probably in his fifities, who was in front of me was contesting his bill. He was correct that it had been added up wrongly, it turned out he had worked as a croupier so was skilled at mental arithmetic, more skilled than the restaurant staff were at punching numbers into a calculator. Perhaps it was his victory which seemed to save him £5 that meant he was bullish at outlining his racist views to anyone in earshot, with me, being behind him in the queue, being the prime target. Of course, he made no attempt to assess if I was open to his lecture, because like so many bigots he assumed that what he was saying was 'common sense' and so could not be challenged and must be accepted by any sane person. His statements reminded me of a brand of racism that I have often encountered down the years but had simply lumped together with the other forms.
You will often come across people who have the conviction that certain sectors of society are getting privileges that the rest of us cannot access. The target is usually lone parents, asylum seekers and/or immigrants. They believe that these people are getting easy access to social welfare payments which exceed the norm and that they can jump the queue in terms of housing and other provision. To force home this point they emphasise how undeserving the people are, usually they are portrayed as a combination of 'not wanting' to work, being feckless, creating children simply to gain financial benefits, unable to speak English, quite often criminal and these days, probably associated with extremist or terrorist activities. The speaker feels that in line with the sense of deserving/undeserving poor, that such people are on the undeserving side. They have no knowledge of how low benefit payments are to anyone, how difficult it is for new arrivers in the UK to claim anything and the poor quality of a lot of accommodation councils are compelled to house people in.
The sting in this type of racism is that it not only attacks the individuals themselves, who are often, though not always, from a different ethnic group from the speaker, but also some faceless bureaucracy that for some reason delights in awarding these bounteous gifts to the people the speaker despises. There is no sense that somehow the civil service or councils have been penetrated by the agents of foreign powers, just a simple assumption that people in such roles have a desire to privilege lone parents and people born abroad or even just British people of non-Caucasian ethnicity. I have worked in different branches of the civil service, and while most civil servants are not racist (though some I have known clearly are), neither do they have a desire to privilege any social or ethnic group. Even if they did, there are very strict rules about what can be given to anyone and the application process for housing or benefits is very lengthy, complex and thorough. No benefits are simply dished out, despite the assumption that racist speakers make. In fact if English is not your first language, it is incredibly hard to navigate your way through all the forms you have to complete to get any benefits.
This assumption, often fostered by tabloid newspapers, that the despised groups in society are in fact the privileged ones not only gives a point on which to bash these groups but also to attack the ordinary people who administer the UK's civil service and council services, who, as it is, often come in for verbal and even physicl attack while trying to do such work. No wonder it is so difficult to recruit social workers when they are accused either of not intervening soon enough when a child or woman dies or, in fact, more commonly, 'sticking their noses in' when people, particularly men, want to run their families in a harsh, often abusive, way. They do a tough job but simply come constantly under fire for whatever they do. Of course, the people making such allegations never would even consider taking a job like that. Their assumptions are that, there will always be people willing to step forward to do such hard work, though, of course, they will be doing it wrongly and privileging the 'wrong' people. It is all too easy to leave it to the state to pick up the pieces from the distorted society and economy caused by thirty years of Thatcherite policies while still whining on constantly about how poorly or incorrectly they are doing it.
The man in front of me had worked in the Bahamas and this allowed him to add an extra layer to the complaints he was making to anyone who would listen. He whined that in the UK that black people, as a minority, are privileged, even though 48% of black males aged 16-24, 31% of Asian males of this age group and 20% of white males at that age are unemployed; a fifth of black men of all ages are unemployed, so who is being privileged? Institutional racism still makes an impact on getting a job. In the Bahamas, 85% of the population is black, 12% white and 3% Hispanic (which I tend to include in white anyway, but is separated out in the USA), whereas in the UK the population is 92% white, only 2% is black, the remaining 6% being Asian, mixed race or other ethnicities. So, on the basis of this man's assumptions, white people should be as privileged in the Bahamas as he believes black people are in the UK. Of course, he did not find that to be the case, and so was angry. It did not lead him to re-assess his 'common sense' assumption that actually in all countries ethnic minorities tend to be disadvantaged it simply led him to assume that there is a conspiracy straddling different countries to put white people at a disadvantage. He did not delight in the fact that he could move back and forth between countries and had always been in work and was clearly wealthy enough to take twenty people to dinner, even if just in a chain restaurant. He had found a basis to whine about how unfairly treated he had been.
As the man's racism began to move into an area which in my experience is uncommon even in public diatribes of such people, I simply walked away. He had got into full stride arguing that as the Bahamas were once a British colony (self-governing since 1964; independent from 1973) and still has the British Queen as its monarch, then the whites should be in control. His views that they would do a better, fairer job belong in the 19th century, though even then they were wrong. It is interesting to find someone who subscribes to the 'white man's burden' view of the current world. I imagine if I had stayed around long enough I would hear how the white man is so much more superior to other races, though this falls down even on the man's own assumptions, because in his world view, black people are extremely clever and assertive in getting benefits that he feels they are not entitled to and do not 'deserve'. It is alarming that such views are not only held in 21st century Britain but that you run the risk of being bombarded with them when you are simply out for a quiet meal, my first in a restaurant for five months. I increasingly despair, but see a real need to challenge these toxic assumptions and stop people thinking that such bigotry and hatred is 'common sense' that no-one could rationally question.
I encountered this phenomenon last night not in a taxi but when I was waiting to pay for a meal. The man, probably in his fifities, who was in front of me was contesting his bill. He was correct that it had been added up wrongly, it turned out he had worked as a croupier so was skilled at mental arithmetic, more skilled than the restaurant staff were at punching numbers into a calculator. Perhaps it was his victory which seemed to save him £5 that meant he was bullish at outlining his racist views to anyone in earshot, with me, being behind him in the queue, being the prime target. Of course, he made no attempt to assess if I was open to his lecture, because like so many bigots he assumed that what he was saying was 'common sense' and so could not be challenged and must be accepted by any sane person. His statements reminded me of a brand of racism that I have often encountered down the years but had simply lumped together with the other forms.
You will often come across people who have the conviction that certain sectors of society are getting privileges that the rest of us cannot access. The target is usually lone parents, asylum seekers and/or immigrants. They believe that these people are getting easy access to social welfare payments which exceed the norm and that they can jump the queue in terms of housing and other provision. To force home this point they emphasise how undeserving the people are, usually they are portrayed as a combination of 'not wanting' to work, being feckless, creating children simply to gain financial benefits, unable to speak English, quite often criminal and these days, probably associated with extremist or terrorist activities. The speaker feels that in line with the sense of deserving/undeserving poor, that such people are on the undeserving side. They have no knowledge of how low benefit payments are to anyone, how difficult it is for new arrivers in the UK to claim anything and the poor quality of a lot of accommodation councils are compelled to house people in.
The sting in this type of racism is that it not only attacks the individuals themselves, who are often, though not always, from a different ethnic group from the speaker, but also some faceless bureaucracy that for some reason delights in awarding these bounteous gifts to the people the speaker despises. There is no sense that somehow the civil service or councils have been penetrated by the agents of foreign powers, just a simple assumption that people in such roles have a desire to privilege lone parents and people born abroad or even just British people of non-Caucasian ethnicity. I have worked in different branches of the civil service, and while most civil servants are not racist (though some I have known clearly are), neither do they have a desire to privilege any social or ethnic group. Even if they did, there are very strict rules about what can be given to anyone and the application process for housing or benefits is very lengthy, complex and thorough. No benefits are simply dished out, despite the assumption that racist speakers make. In fact if English is not your first language, it is incredibly hard to navigate your way through all the forms you have to complete to get any benefits.
This assumption, often fostered by tabloid newspapers, that the despised groups in society are in fact the privileged ones not only gives a point on which to bash these groups but also to attack the ordinary people who administer the UK's civil service and council services, who, as it is, often come in for verbal and even physicl attack while trying to do such work. No wonder it is so difficult to recruit social workers when they are accused either of not intervening soon enough when a child or woman dies or, in fact, more commonly, 'sticking their noses in' when people, particularly men, want to run their families in a harsh, often abusive, way. They do a tough job but simply come constantly under fire for whatever they do. Of course, the people making such allegations never would even consider taking a job like that. Their assumptions are that, there will always be people willing to step forward to do such hard work, though, of course, they will be doing it wrongly and privileging the 'wrong' people. It is all too easy to leave it to the state to pick up the pieces from the distorted society and economy caused by thirty years of Thatcherite policies while still whining on constantly about how poorly or incorrectly they are doing it.
The man in front of me had worked in the Bahamas and this allowed him to add an extra layer to the complaints he was making to anyone who would listen. He whined that in the UK that black people, as a minority, are privileged, even though 48% of black males aged 16-24, 31% of Asian males of this age group and 20% of white males at that age are unemployed; a fifth of black men of all ages are unemployed, so who is being privileged? Institutional racism still makes an impact on getting a job. In the Bahamas, 85% of the population is black, 12% white and 3% Hispanic (which I tend to include in white anyway, but is separated out in the USA), whereas in the UK the population is 92% white, only 2% is black, the remaining 6% being Asian, mixed race or other ethnicities. So, on the basis of this man's assumptions, white people should be as privileged in the Bahamas as he believes black people are in the UK. Of course, he did not find that to be the case, and so was angry. It did not lead him to re-assess his 'common sense' assumption that actually in all countries ethnic minorities tend to be disadvantaged it simply led him to assume that there is a conspiracy straddling different countries to put white people at a disadvantage. He did not delight in the fact that he could move back and forth between countries and had always been in work and was clearly wealthy enough to take twenty people to dinner, even if just in a chain restaurant. He had found a basis to whine about how unfairly treated he had been.
As the man's racism began to move into an area which in my experience is uncommon even in public diatribes of such people, I simply walked away. He had got into full stride arguing that as the Bahamas were once a British colony (self-governing since 1964; independent from 1973) and still has the British Queen as its monarch, then the whites should be in control. His views that they would do a better, fairer job belong in the 19th century, though even then they were wrong. It is interesting to find someone who subscribes to the 'white man's burden' view of the current world. I imagine if I had stayed around long enough I would hear how the white man is so much more superior to other races, though this falls down even on the man's own assumptions, because in his world view, black people are extremely clever and assertive in getting benefits that he feels they are not entitled to and do not 'deserve'. It is alarming that such views are not only held in 21st century Britain but that you run the risk of being bombarded with them when you are simply out for a quiet meal, my first in a restaurant for five months. I increasingly despair, but see a real need to challenge these toxic assumptions and stop people thinking that such bigotry and hatred is 'common sense' that no-one could rationally question.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Dangerous Days for British Politics?
Well, I finally got to look at the European election results. They are probably the worst guide to what will happen in a general election than any other results because the system used differs so far from the electoral system used in all other elections in Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland). However, it is a good indicator of trends and attitudes. To some extent it has not revealed any particular disgust with politicians as the turnout at 35% is the same as it always is for European elections and shows the extent to which most people in the UK see no connection to what goes on in the European Parliament to their everyday lives, though they will whinge about the limits on working hours and the nature of their fruit. Of course, it is the European Commission and the thorough application by all UK governments (whether Conservative, even under Thatcher or Labour) of all EU regulations.
The UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) now have 13 MEPs, the same as Labour. There have been abortive attempts at parties which plan to get the UK out of the EU, notably the Referendum Party, but UKIP for all its problems has been the only one which has managed to grow. They have no MPs and are unlikely to get them with the system we use in our general elections, so there will be a disjuncture between our national parliament even after the next election, and our European representation. It is weird that a party that wants nothing to do with Europe will now have its members heavily involved there. What alarms me, and was apparent from the UKIP publicity, which in the areas I visit exceeded that of all the other parties combined in terms of quantity, is that effectively they are an extreme right-wing, nationalist party and given their views on 'protecting UK borders' they are like a light version of the BNP (British National Party) which itself has moved on from referencing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to more racialist viewpoints. UKIP's discriminatory policies have now added a bridge between the right-wing of the Conservative Party and the BNP and most dangerously are another party for whom spouting such bigotry is normal.
Of course, as Channel 4 News highlighted last night, the support for the BNP (British National Party), who got two MEPs (and importantly the money that brings), came from old traditional Labour voters. This is not a new phenomenon, you only have to look at early support for the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important constituency for them, and you have people moving between the Communists (KPD) and Nazis (NSDAP) quite often, sometimes depending on what social facilities each party could offer. The fact that extreme left and extreme right meet is something long known. If you reject democracy, it then simply comes down to emphasis on which groups you are going to attack. What is interesting to consider is where votes came from for UKIP. Some it is clear came from the BNP whose share of the vote actually fell. The only reason why Nick Griffin got in as an MEP is because support for Labour fell too. This is precisely what I said about each individuals vote counting far more when turnout is low (and in this case turnout from particular voters). I said this on the day and many Labour voters need to feel ashamed that they allowed the far right to get such a bridgehead because they did not get out and vote. As the turnout itself maintained, this suggests Labour voters were also replaced by extreme right-wing voters who in the past would not have voted at a European Parliament election. Interestingly, in contrast to France and Germany where the extreme left have done well, there is no sign of that in the UK. Perhaps we need something stronger on the left than Scargill's Socialist Labour Party or certainly have a different leader with more credibility.
We have always had people opposed to the EU. Personally I think it is a good idea which sometimes works imperfectly and the way to bring about change is not to turn your back on it, but engage more and get efficiency in how it works. On a purely selfish basis, myself and many members of my extended family have benefited directly from the EU (especially those of my family who are farmers) and we would all be worse off if the UK had stayed out. However, millions of UK citizens benefit from the EU and never notice. If the UK left the EU a lot of labour and social legislation we enjoy the benefits of would be under threat, the price of many goods would rise immediately, especially food items (the UK has long been a food importer) and actually UK farming would suffer immensely as it would be outside its largest market. Of course we could put up stronger barriers to Polish workers coming to the UK, but that is as much about employers tempting them here with low wages (though higher than in Poland) and using even illegal immigrants especially in the boom of 1994-2007. If employers had paid decent wages and not tried to squeeze out even more millions of profits then this issue would not have risen. British nationalists like the BNP and UKIP seem to believe that there is something inherently attractive about the UK compared to other countries. There is the element that we speak English which is commonly learnt in many countries, but if employers had not been drawing on immigrant workers then they would have gone somewhere that was. It is about economics, but of course for the far right they ignore all that and think it is some mystical force.
The real danger now is that the language of the far right has become legitimate. I heard Andrew Brons, the other BNP MEP, talking on Channel 4 News last night about the 'indigenous people' of the UK (which in fact are the Celts, but he meant anyone white) as if this was a legitimate term. He dismissed the word 'racist' as being invented by a Trotskyite in the 1930s, as if that made it invalid (and in fact he seems to be ignorant of where his own views originated from in the biological racialism that developed in the 1860s) and was not challenged on his statement. Now that the BNP has a platform I can only hope that people will see how foolish so many of their statements are. However, where they succeed is by making their extreme views seem 'normal'. Again in the interview, Brons said that expelling failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants was a given as if that had already been resolved. The UK expels many of these people anyway, but there is no sense that represents thousands of personal disasters and deaths that the UK government contributes to on a daily basis.
Most alarming they do not consider anyone who is non-white to be able to be British. I have not heard how they view the 700,000 mixed race people in the UK. Of course, supposedly liberal West Germany maintained the law that only those with two German parents could ever vote. They also tried deporting delinquent children (aged 14+) of second generation Turkish settlers to Turkey a country they had never visited (naturally Turkey refused to take them). Finally Germany was compelled to remove this racist law that dated back to 1913. However, it shows how easy it is for racist policies to exist even in the 2000s when all of us go on diversity training. I know people who lived in South Africa in the apartheid era and what people forget is in fact the regime affected everyone badly. Of course blacks got it worse, but everyone in South Africa of whatever ethnicity had to be classified and if suddenly you were reclassified you found yourself excluded from certain services. Such an approach as in Nazi Germany immediately leads to corruption of public services and inefficiency. Of course the identity card system envisaged for the UK will play right into the hands of the far right. One reason why it has not advanced is because of how difficult it is and how costly. An apartheid system will be far worse. Also people forget a key reason why South Africa ended apartheid was not political but economic, you cannot bring the best out of all your citizens if you put them into different boxes and enforce segregation. The UK transport system is in a dire situation, imagine if you had to have 'whites only' carriages. The UK is too inter-twined with Europe to be divorced and its population is too inter-twined to try to bring about some artificial segregation.
British society has always been full of bigots and racists. It also has people like my grandfather (a life-long Labour supporter) who grumbled about 'the darkies' but always complimented how hard working the Asian woman next door and the black men he worked with were and could never see the fact that these people made up the group he saw as the 'darkies'. Any group in society is made up of individuals that we know. Whereas last week bigots may have bitten their lip now they feel they can speak out and that is going to lead quickly to millions of individual tragedies as they feel heartened by the election result and the sense that the views of UKIP and BNP are held widely and legitimate. We cannot now avoid race riots in the coming months. The UK is going to become a very unpleasant place whatever colour you are, especially if you live in a city. We can only pray for a rainy summer rather than a hot one otherwise it will make 1981 look like a picnic in the park. All good people need to constantly contest racist behaviour and use the term 'racist' when we see it otherwise we are going to be living in a country of armed camps.
Clearly both UKIP and BNP have not thought anything about the economy. I have mentioned how employers have driven economic migration by their desire for cheap labour. However, if we even begin moving towards far-right policies then the economy will suffer immediately. People forget why West Indian and Asian immigration was encouraged in the 1950s (and the same applies to Turkish, Yugoslav and Italian immigration into Germany) it was to fill labour shortages especially in the service sector (which of course has become the dominant sector of our economy since 1974) and to start intimidating and removing people in those industries is going to send the UK economy rapidly back into the 1970s. Hospitals would close, shops in many towns would disappear, the transport sector would be cut back. The UK has had immigration for over 2000 years, to try and rip out certain people from UK society is going to be like cutting off an arm because it happens to be your right one.
The fight against racism now has to be stepped up a gear. We need to work to squeeze the bridgehead the bigots have established and challenge their behaviour so that it does not become 'normal', it is always abnormal and abhorrent. Of course, if the Conservatives win the next general election, their policies will be infected by the rhetoric of the hard right, partly because they have very few policies anyway; there is no indication of how they would have dealt with the credit crunch, the bank collapses or the MPs expenses scandals at all. Of course, disillusion with MPs is at its peak and this is a golden opportunity for extreme parties to play on that, as Hitler did in the early 1930s. The price for their success will be a very high one for the UK economy, British society and millions of individuals to pay.
The UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) now have 13 MEPs, the same as Labour. There have been abortive attempts at parties which plan to get the UK out of the EU, notably the Referendum Party, but UKIP for all its problems has been the only one which has managed to grow. They have no MPs and are unlikely to get them with the system we use in our general elections, so there will be a disjuncture between our national parliament even after the next election, and our European representation. It is weird that a party that wants nothing to do with Europe will now have its members heavily involved there. What alarms me, and was apparent from the UKIP publicity, which in the areas I visit exceeded that of all the other parties combined in terms of quantity, is that effectively they are an extreme right-wing, nationalist party and given their views on 'protecting UK borders' they are like a light version of the BNP (British National Party) which itself has moved on from referencing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to more racialist viewpoints. UKIP's discriminatory policies have now added a bridge between the right-wing of the Conservative Party and the BNP and most dangerously are another party for whom spouting such bigotry is normal.
Of course, as Channel 4 News highlighted last night, the support for the BNP (British National Party), who got two MEPs (and importantly the money that brings), came from old traditional Labour voters. This is not a new phenomenon, you only have to look at early support for the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important constituency for them, and you have people moving between the Communists (KPD) and Nazis (NSDAP) quite often, sometimes depending on what social facilities each party could offer. The fact that extreme left and extreme right meet is something long known. If you reject democracy, it then simply comes down to emphasis on which groups you are going to attack. What is interesting to consider is where votes came from for UKIP. Some it is clear came from the BNP whose share of the vote actually fell. The only reason why Nick Griffin got in as an MEP is because support for Labour fell too. This is precisely what I said about each individuals vote counting far more when turnout is low (and in this case turnout from particular voters). I said this on the day and many Labour voters need to feel ashamed that they allowed the far right to get such a bridgehead because they did not get out and vote. As the turnout itself maintained, this suggests Labour voters were also replaced by extreme right-wing voters who in the past would not have voted at a European Parliament election. Interestingly, in contrast to France and Germany where the extreme left have done well, there is no sign of that in the UK. Perhaps we need something stronger on the left than Scargill's Socialist Labour Party or certainly have a different leader with more credibility.
We have always had people opposed to the EU. Personally I think it is a good idea which sometimes works imperfectly and the way to bring about change is not to turn your back on it, but engage more and get efficiency in how it works. On a purely selfish basis, myself and many members of my extended family have benefited directly from the EU (especially those of my family who are farmers) and we would all be worse off if the UK had stayed out. However, millions of UK citizens benefit from the EU and never notice. If the UK left the EU a lot of labour and social legislation we enjoy the benefits of would be under threat, the price of many goods would rise immediately, especially food items (the UK has long been a food importer) and actually UK farming would suffer immensely as it would be outside its largest market. Of course we could put up stronger barriers to Polish workers coming to the UK, but that is as much about employers tempting them here with low wages (though higher than in Poland) and using even illegal immigrants especially in the boom of 1994-2007. If employers had paid decent wages and not tried to squeeze out even more millions of profits then this issue would not have risen. British nationalists like the BNP and UKIP seem to believe that there is something inherently attractive about the UK compared to other countries. There is the element that we speak English which is commonly learnt in many countries, but if employers had not been drawing on immigrant workers then they would have gone somewhere that was. It is about economics, but of course for the far right they ignore all that and think it is some mystical force.
The real danger now is that the language of the far right has become legitimate. I heard Andrew Brons, the other BNP MEP, talking on Channel 4 News last night about the 'indigenous people' of the UK (which in fact are the Celts, but he meant anyone white) as if this was a legitimate term. He dismissed the word 'racist' as being invented by a Trotskyite in the 1930s, as if that made it invalid (and in fact he seems to be ignorant of where his own views originated from in the biological racialism that developed in the 1860s) and was not challenged on his statement. Now that the BNP has a platform I can only hope that people will see how foolish so many of their statements are. However, where they succeed is by making their extreme views seem 'normal'. Again in the interview, Brons said that expelling failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants was a given as if that had already been resolved. The UK expels many of these people anyway, but there is no sense that represents thousands of personal disasters and deaths that the UK government contributes to on a daily basis.
Most alarming they do not consider anyone who is non-white to be able to be British. I have not heard how they view the 700,000 mixed race people in the UK. Of course, supposedly liberal West Germany maintained the law that only those with two German parents could ever vote. They also tried deporting delinquent children (aged 14+) of second generation Turkish settlers to Turkey a country they had never visited (naturally Turkey refused to take them). Finally Germany was compelled to remove this racist law that dated back to 1913. However, it shows how easy it is for racist policies to exist even in the 2000s when all of us go on diversity training. I know people who lived in South Africa in the apartheid era and what people forget is in fact the regime affected everyone badly. Of course blacks got it worse, but everyone in South Africa of whatever ethnicity had to be classified and if suddenly you were reclassified you found yourself excluded from certain services. Such an approach as in Nazi Germany immediately leads to corruption of public services and inefficiency. Of course the identity card system envisaged for the UK will play right into the hands of the far right. One reason why it has not advanced is because of how difficult it is and how costly. An apartheid system will be far worse. Also people forget a key reason why South Africa ended apartheid was not political but economic, you cannot bring the best out of all your citizens if you put them into different boxes and enforce segregation. The UK transport system is in a dire situation, imagine if you had to have 'whites only' carriages. The UK is too inter-twined with Europe to be divorced and its population is too inter-twined to try to bring about some artificial segregation.
British society has always been full of bigots and racists. It also has people like my grandfather (a life-long Labour supporter) who grumbled about 'the darkies' but always complimented how hard working the Asian woman next door and the black men he worked with were and could never see the fact that these people made up the group he saw as the 'darkies'. Any group in society is made up of individuals that we know. Whereas last week bigots may have bitten their lip now they feel they can speak out and that is going to lead quickly to millions of individual tragedies as they feel heartened by the election result and the sense that the views of UKIP and BNP are held widely and legitimate. We cannot now avoid race riots in the coming months. The UK is going to become a very unpleasant place whatever colour you are, especially if you live in a city. We can only pray for a rainy summer rather than a hot one otherwise it will make 1981 look like a picnic in the park. All good people need to constantly contest racist behaviour and use the term 'racist' when we see it otherwise we are going to be living in a country of armed camps.
Clearly both UKIP and BNP have not thought anything about the economy. I have mentioned how employers have driven economic migration by their desire for cheap labour. However, if we even begin moving towards far-right policies then the economy will suffer immediately. People forget why West Indian and Asian immigration was encouraged in the 1950s (and the same applies to Turkish, Yugoslav and Italian immigration into Germany) it was to fill labour shortages especially in the service sector (which of course has become the dominant sector of our economy since 1974) and to start intimidating and removing people in those industries is going to send the UK economy rapidly back into the 1970s. Hospitals would close, shops in many towns would disappear, the transport sector would be cut back. The UK has had immigration for over 2000 years, to try and rip out certain people from UK society is going to be like cutting off an arm because it happens to be your right one.
The fight against racism now has to be stepped up a gear. We need to work to squeeze the bridgehead the bigots have established and challenge their behaviour so that it does not become 'normal', it is always abnormal and abhorrent. Of course, if the Conservatives win the next general election, their policies will be infected by the rhetoric of the hard right, partly because they have very few policies anyway; there is no indication of how they would have dealt with the credit crunch, the bank collapses or the MPs expenses scandals at all. Of course, disillusion with MPs is at its peak and this is a golden opportunity for extreme parties to play on that, as Hitler did in the early 1930s. The price for their success will be a very high one for the UK economy, British society and millions of individuals to pay.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Being Ethnically Reclassified in the UK
Many readers will be familiar with the character in many of the Agatha Christie detective novels called Miss Jane Marple. She is an elderly woman who solves crimes by relating them to parallel incidents that she had experienced in her own small village. Authors soon become familiar with the fact that whatever the setting whether it is Ancient Egypt, contemporary Britain or a colony many light years away then people generally behave the same, they have anger, jealously, envy, pomposity, compassion, love and many other factors. Being human even when we write about alien or fantastical species we do it through the vision of being human and we make these characters as human or as anti-human as we choose, but for us we define them on the spectrum. Sorry, back to the point. Anyway, for me, I tend to analyse things less by incidents I have witnessed in real life, I tend to spend a rather reclusive existence, but parallels in fiction whether written or in movies. I access the global village of fiction which of course is based on numerous incidences that the authors and scriptwriters and to some extent actors and directors have experienced themselves.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
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